A number of people have asked what is our recipe for hosting Ruby on Rails applications. Today we decided to share our hosting recipe with the world in the form of a step by step blog post to get started.

All our applications are hosted by Heroku, a great service that allows us to focus on coding the application with minimal efforts on the hosting side. Take Off Labs is also an official Heroku partner.

Initial Setup

First, go to Heroku.com and create a new account. Download the Heroku toolbelt and set it up – the process is automatic using the “heroku login” command. It will ask you for your credentials and set up the secure keys.

Then, go into the application that you want to set up and run “heroku create [name]”. Substitute name with the actual name of your application. This will already generate a public url for your app at [name].herokuapp.com.

The usual addons

99.5% of the apps need a database. So go ahead and add the PostgreSQL addon from Heroku.com. It’s also a good idea to add the PGBackups addon – this is free and is going to backup your database daily.

99.4% of the apps need to send e-mails. We use sendgrid which is also available as an addon from Heroku. On the free plan, you get 200 emails per day, which is enough to get started. So go ahead and add the sendgrid addon to your app.

Sign up for an account at Airbrake. Airbrake is also available as an addon, but they don’t provide a free option. However, if you sign up on their website, you can get a very good free package. Here is a link directly to the free plan.